Yesterday, College President Phil Hanlon responded to a letter from the Student and Presidential Committee on Sexual Assault calling on the College to put the psychological and brain sciences department into receivership and begin a new investigation of the department.

PBPL 51, “Leadership in Civil Society,” a class taught by Rockefeller Center for Public Policy associate director Ronald Shaiko, will distribute around $40,000 to eight Upper Valley nonprofits this term. This was made possible by The Philanthropy Lab, a Texas-based organization which offers grants for philanthropy projects. Students in the class will select eight Upper Valley nonprofits to receive donations of $5,000 each. Shaiko said that the students have complete independence in making the funding decisions.

The John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding and the Geisel School of Medicine recently received a $7 million gift from a combination of four anonymous families. This donation, part of the College’s ongoing Call to Lead capital campaign, will support faculty development and expand student global health equity programs domestically and internationally in partner areas such as Tanzania and Kosovo. These donations will be used to increase the number of undergraduate students and partners involved in off-campus learning experiences, the Global Health Policy Lab and internships, according to Geisel dean Duane Compton.

Herman Cain, a businessman, former chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, gave a sparsely-attended talk about economics on Thursday evening to roughly 25 students and community members.

Last week, the College announced that its workplace misconduct investigation into two administrators of The Dartmouth Institute had concluded. The investigation, which began nine months ago, resulted in Elliott Fisher, a nationally known expert in health policy, being removed as director of TDI and losing his endowed professorship title while being allowed to stay on as a member of the faculty. Meanwhile, Adam Keller, another TDI administrator, resigned from his position.

Just last fall, Ilhan Omar (D-MN) was elected as the representative of Minnesota’s 5th district. Since then, she has faced a relentless storm of personal attacks and death threats, and has featured in one controversy after another. Scandals and personal attacks are nothing new for anyone in politics, but the level of vitriol directed at Omar, a Somali-born refugee who moved to the U.S. as a teenager, seems to be especially extreme. Unfortunately, as Omar stands up for herself, politicians too often deliberately stoke fury towards her or idly stand by.

For hundreds of years, Dartmouth did not fulfill its commitment to Native Americans. Dartmouth’s campus is built on the land of Abenaki indigenous people, and Dartmouth’s founding charter outlines that the school’s principal mission is to educate Native youth. But in its first 200 years of existence, Dartmouth only graduated 19 Native Americans. When Native students finally did matriculate to Dartmouth in meaningful numbers, many of them were not exactly thrilled to see that Dartmouth had an Indian mascot, and they widely protested it. Native students Howard Bad Hand ’73, Duane Bird Bear ’71 and Rick Buckanaga ’72 were among those who led the call to end the use of Dartmouth’s Indian mascot in the 1970s, and in 1974, the Board of Trustees agreed with the protestors that the mascot was inconsistent with the values that Dartmouth is supposed to uphold.

Everyone’s favorite New England postcard is in trouble. For years, tourists have flocked to the Upper Valley, where antique barns are framed by the rough-hewn fences that rein in gentle and photogenic Holsteins. If they’re lucky, they might even get a glimpse of a farmer who charmingly lacks a few teeth and says “ayup” with that old New England agrarian accent. But you would be hard pressed to find that today. The reality is that the Upper Valley and many rural farming communities around the country are feeling the squeeze. Family farms found some success in the later years of the Obama presidency, but since then, profits have decreased by almost a third. There is no question that family-run agriculture has been in decline over the last half-century, partly due to the changing demands of ever-changing consumer tastes.

Twenty-four candidates have filed to run for president in 2020. Twenty-two of them are running as Democrats. With such a crowded field, we asked opinion writers to comment on what makes them hopeful, anxious or excited about the Democratic 2020 primary.

I was in high school the first time I heard the term “white privilege.” A 90 percent white faculty taught me and my mostly white classmates about the wrongs of racism in an American history course. Racism felt like something out of the past. Once I arrived at college, though, I suddenly faced the reality that racial issues in our nation should not be seen through the rose-tinted lens of “history.”

Kelleen Moriarty ’19, the student director for the upcoming production of “The Glass Menagerie,” has been involved in theater since she was in middle school. According to Moriarty, when she first came to Dartmouth, she knew that she wanted to major in theater and eventually pursue it professionally, since theater was “the one thing” in her life she was “very sure” of.

James Parker, one of the convicted killers in the Zantop murders — the fatal stabbing of two Dartmouth professors in 2001 — is seeking early release. The hearing was originally scheduled to take place on April 30 but has since been postponed without another scheduled date. In an email statement, Parker’s lawyer, Cathy Green, attributed the postponement to the illness of a key witness.

The Dartmouth College Democrats have joined over 70 other College Democrats chapters to boycott the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee over its new policy blacklisting firms which work with challengers to incumbent Democratic representatives.

Frustrated by the limited availability of practice spaces, student musicians are planning to send a petition to the administration of the Hopkins Center for the Arts asking for the installation of more practice rooms for students early next week as part of upcoming renovation plans. The petition currently has over 175 signatures from current and former students who are a part of student performance groups and ensembles.

With around 900 people packed into Spaulding Auditorium yesterday and latecomers turned away for a lack of remaining seats, the Dartmouth community took part in a conversation with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and two of her former aides. The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee addressed the Iran nuclear deal, the 2016 election, impeaching President Donald Trump and empowering women in public service.

At face value, the phrase “war and peace” is contradictory. But these contradictions make us human. We say we want balance but continue to pile on commitment after commitment. We strive for a healthier diet but always sneak that extra cookie on our way out of Foco. It is easy for us to think one thing and do something else or to try upholding some set of values while our lifestyles tell a different story.

To most, spring term means lots of rain, Green Key and relaxing afternoons on the Green with glimpses of sunlight if we’re lucky. To some self-identifying women in the Class of 2022 and beyond, however, spring term also represents the ever-daunting mystery that is sorority pre-rush.

By the Aegis’s account, Students for a Democratic Society never existed at Dartmouth. Student newspapers and oral histories identify 1969 through 1971 as the period of peak activity for the anti-Vietnam War activist organization, but Dartmouth’s yearbooks from these years do not once mention SDS.